I didn’t leave you hanging! I told you yesterday with the Wonder Woman Cookies that I had a Wonder Woman Cupcake Cake post coming up and here it is! Yey, go me, go me, it’s my birthday, we’re going to party like it’s my birthday.

Please tell me you kind of know the song I was just referencing. I mean I totally botched it up and all but please tell me I’m not THAT old. I was singing that around a kid here recently. By kid, she’s an early teen. I think maybe 8th or 9th grade this year. She looked at me straight-faced and said, it’s not my birthday. Yes, yes I know… it’s a song. Sigh. I tried then to explain the song and yeah, it was lost on deaf ears I think. Sad day! I’m the “old” person in the room. In my life, I usually am the youngest of the group of people I run around with. I’m kind of used to it…

But… let’s not focus on that… let’s focus on the fact that I made a Wonder Woman Birthday Cupcake Cake for my friend Jody’s daughter. Oh who by the way, Jody is younger than me. WHAT? Yup, I show my age there too, but I’m only a couple years older… I think ;). Shhhhh, don’t tell, please!

Jody

Speak of the devil, here’s Jody. Everyone say, “Hi Jody!” I promise I’m not a mammoth… I’m just slightly taller than she is :).

So here while back, she asked if I could do the sugar cookies. Then I forgot. Then she reminded me. Whew… off the hook, I remembered after that. I may have written it down… I’ll never tell. So I had plans of making the cookies. I verified how many cookies she wanted and she said a dozen. Okay, I can do that. She said, yeah, a dozen because she also wants cupcakes. Now I mention this bizarrely because she tells me her kids don’t like cake.

Now, jump forward to the week of the party and in one of Jody and my many conversations she mentions everything she has to do between “now” and Saturday. I put the now in quotes because I can’t remember what day this all went down. She also mentioned that she needed to figure out how to decorate the cupcakes.

Enter Nicole… Problem solver extraordinaire.

I started sending her many different ideas to the point she told me she couldn’t do any of them. I was like, but they’re easy. So she basically told me to put my money where my mouth was and I took that as a challenge. So I made the Cupcake Cake.

The Cupcakes

Here’s where I should mention too that with everything she had to get done, I said, you know what, just let me do the cupcakes. You sleep. She works at night and should be sleeping during the day… but news flash, she doesn’t. Jody… I hope you’re reading this… SLEEP! :).

Initially, the plan was she was going to come over on Thursday with baked cupcakes and we were going to decorate. Then I got to thinking… Hello, why don’t I just decorate them the day of the party? I can do it quickly, I’d just show up about 30 minutes or so early and decorate the cake on the spot. Made sense to me. Then to help her out, I even volunteered to make the cupcakes. News flash (again) I like to bake. If you didn’t know that… well, now you do.

So why on earth am I wearing a Unicorn headband in the photo below? Well… truthfully… my little came up and put it on my head. I’d had a pretty rough day that day. This will all come clear in the near future. Hopefully, we’ll have an answer and then I can share whatever that answer is. Please by all means, if you pray, just pray the right thing happens. That’s what I keep praying for and I don’t know what that outcome is or should be… I just know and want God to let the right thing happen. Okay, back to regularly scheduled programming.

I kept forgetting the headband was on my head and every time I’d catch my reflection, I’d laugh which actually made me feel better! Laughing is good for the soul.

Chocolate Cupcakes

I truly believe last year when I did the cupcake challenge, I learned a lot about cupcakes. That’s the whole point of doing a challenge, right? Grow, learn something, etc. I believe that was accomplished. So making cupcakes now isn’t such a daunting task. That’s nice! I asked Jody what kind and she said, I don’t care. Gee, that is a lot of help. I decided to do two types… Chocolate and Funfetti. Generally speaking, that usually includes everyone’s taste.

The next question was do I use box cake mix or make from scratch? Eventually, I decided from scratch. Now a box cake mix is just the dry ingredients mixed together, basically. But still… I like to bake so why not. Question number 2… what recipe? So many to choose from after all. Sometimes you just find a baker that you like their style and you go searching their recipes. That’s what I did. Lately, I’ve really liked Life, Love, and Sugar. She has a lot of great recipes and with this whole cake kick I’ve been on… she never disappoints. I decided to search through her files. She had a recipe for Best Homemade Chocolate Cupcakes so I decided to try it. I’m here to tell you 1) it’s quite the claim to say “BEST” and 2) they didn’t disappoint.

I might say the only thing about them is they came out flat like you’d think of for a cake, versus rounded on top like a cupcake. No big deal to me. I’m cool with that. I also decided that since we are approaching Halloween, why not use Halloween Cupcake papers. Is that what they’re called? Cupcake papers? Anyway. Isn’t that a cute design? I thought that it was perfect for the chocolate cupcakes. I’m fun like that… sometimes.

Funfetti Cupcakes

Next came the task of finding a Vanilla cupcake or a Funfetti cupcake. Back to the drawing board. Life, Love, and Sugar didn’t let me down again. She had a recipe called Perfect Moist and Fluffy Vanilla Cupcakes. Okay, truth time… I might have almost been turned off on these cupcakes because of the word moist in the title. I kind of don’t like that word… #truth. That and Creamy. Yuck! But I thought I’ll give these cupcakes a try!

I’m glad I did give them a try because, YUM! Now, the one change I made was I added sprinkles to make them Funfetti Cupcakes. I added about 1/2-3/4 of a cup of sprinkles. Sprinkles are just fun man. If you haven’t been around these parts long, then I’ll let you in on a little secret… My Wedding cake had Funfetti layers and Chocolate layers. When Susan asked what kind of cake I wanted, I told her I wanted funfetti because I like funfetti but also, I kind of wanted to make people laugh.

Again, I chose Halloween wrappers for the cupcakes. Aren’t they fun?

When the Funfetti baked, they had a little more dome on the top but not by much. I decided I needed 24 cupcakes and that’s just what I made. Oh wait, I did have 3 extra funfetti… one for hubby, one for me, and one for Abug to eat as a treat. I’m kind of cool like that.

Wonder Woman Cupcake Cake

So you’ll want 24 cupcakes for this cake. I kept my like cupcakes together because like I mentioned before, the funfetti had a little more dome than the chocolate. You’ll also want icing!

Icing

I stayed with my tried and true icing recipe. I debated trying something new but doing this cake on the spot, hubby said I wouldn’t be able to scrap and redo. Good point. I did make a modification and swap out some of the shortening for butter. It’s only the right thing to do, obviously.

You’ll want to dye some of the icing red, some blue, and yellow. The color I forgot was to leave some white for the stars on her dress. I improvised and just made the stars yellow. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

I was also worried I wouldn’t have enough icing. It’s always a fear of mine. Good news, I had enough. In fact, I left some of it with Jody. She put it in a freezer ziplock bag and she’s ready to go when she needs it. Because obviously, she’ll need those colors :). All she has to do is let it come to room temperature, stir it up, and she’s ready to go. BAM!